Oil prices are down again, and that’s bad. But what’s happening at the Paris climate talks could be even worse for Alberta’s economy.

The federal government, apparently without notice to the province, says it will back an international push to limit the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.

Federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna said “we support reference to striving for 1.5 as other countries have said.” Her staff later confirmed this in emails. The 1.5-degree target now seems to be national policy.

But the more usual standard has been two degrees. The province used it to form policies for abandoning coal, capping oilsands production, and imposing a $3-billion-a-year carbon tax.

University of Alberta economist Andrew Leach, who chaired the NDP’s climate change advisory panel, said “the speed of the transition away from coal, and then by extension away from oil, would be more rapid under a 1.5-degree target than a two-degree target.

“All those global actions would have impacts on Alberta. And taking on those policies domestically without other action would have just significantly larger impacts here.”

And yet, the policies recently announced by the NDP won’t even conform to the two-degree target.

“We just couldn’t meet that standard, because we felt it would lead to too much of this push-away,” says Leach.

“I thought we were clear that to put in those policies here, while not seeing them elsewhere, would lead to that flight of capital and employment and economic activity, as well as emissions.”

The report from Leach’s panel talks a lot about “leakage,” meaning the flight of emissions to other jurisdictions with lax rules that make them cheaper to blow into the atmosphere.

But it’s not just emissions that leak. Jobs, capital and industry would leave Alberta to emit more freely elsewhere.

“That’s precisely it,” Leach says. “That’s why we came down on this (in the report.)

“Until the rest of the world has policies that impose similar cost, you’re not actually reducing emissions to the extent you think. You’re just displacing the emissions and the economic activity to other jurisdictions.”

For Alberta, the new standard could be punitive when interprovincial horse-trading starts, after a deal is struck in Paris and McKenna comes home.

And all this makes you wonder why Shannon Phillips, Alberta’s environment minister, is playing down the news about the new Canadian standard.

She has no word of criticism; indeed, she barely acknowledges that it happened.

“I’m not going to presume to speak for the federal government,” Phillips said Tuesday in a telephone news conference from Paris.

“They are, of course, part of the negotiations in the United Nations process. Our position is that we have unveiled a robust package of policies that we believe signals our willingness to do our part.

“And so that’s our position. We have taken our share of the responsibilities.”

Phillips said Alberta’s plan has been received with surprise and delight in Paris.

“What I have heard is people from national jurisdictions and elsewhere just saying, ‘Wow, we applaud you, and we are a little bit envious of what you were able to do in six months.’”

The province, however, is a “subnational organization” without direct access to the bargaining table.

“Our role as a subnational — we’re now part of the compact of states and regions — is to do the doing.”

That’s what Phillips said — do the doing — by which she appears to mean the province gets to implement what others negotiate.

The NDP strategy is to spread goodwill, show that Alberta is already sacrificing, and win as many allies as possible among other provinces.

If anything, the NDP government is overplaying its climate-change plan as the most radical thing ever, the very best Alberta can manage, to shield the province from more demands later.

For now, it’s not the worst strategy. This province is going to need friends, and fast.

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It appears increasingly likely that Alberta’s unpopular carbon tax only has a few months to live, so it comes as little solace to see a sudden burst of enthusiasm from the very environmental groups that played a hand in its probable demise.